I wonder if this is a “pastor’s wife” thing as much as a “Christian wife” thing that is intensified by the expectation that the pastor’s wife will be the ideal embodiment of “Biblical Womahood™”

But it’s important we keep knowing what really happened.

Be tested because they sound like the missile sirens back home The trauma is as much the vicarious trauma of what the sound means for her grandchildren as it is the direct trauma of the days they spent fleeing the country.

Trump can say Ukraine started it. Some people will start to believe him.

a PoW in Russia. My husband’s closest friends have all joined up. One is on the front lines. His hometown has been bombed. His niece often sleeps in her bathtub through terrifying missile strikes. My MiL lives with us, and after two years I continue to let her know when the tornado sirens will...

and we sat on the phone as i watched footage on TV. I cried. He reported on his family’s plans. Over the next few days they fled the country. His nephew spent his days helping to evacuate people to the boarder. A formerly close friend has now been MIA for over a year. We hope he is dead and not..

the company was so good. Later, when I got back to my room, I had all these texts asking if my family was okay. Confused, I googled the news and discovered that Russia had invaded Ukraine without provocation. A line of tanks and soldiers was headed toward Kiev. I called my Ukrainian husband…

the now-popular constructs of resilience, grit, and post-traumatic growth, which, alone, can lead to impoverished affective and epistemic relationships to evil and suffering.

Kate Manne had excellent blog post on the problem with resilience yesterday:
katemanne.substack.com/p/is-resilie...

distinguish my conception of flourishing from the veins of positive psychology that view "negative emotions" like anger, grief, and blame, as at best transient springboards to further positivity, and at worst as morally suspect affective states, and to distinguish post-traumatic flourishing from…

(6/6) Parental rights are the primary frame, not the child’s experience of pain, suffering, fear, and violation. And so children (and former children) are left with few resources to make sense of harm that neither the state nor society nor language easily recognizes.

(5/6) health disorder). What stands out most is that both the dominant social discourse and much of existing legislation is constructed to answer the question, “How much should parents and guardians have *the right* to do to their children before the State intervenes?”

(4/6) If your lip was bloodied by a slap in the face, you were abused in Arkansas but not in Minnesota. If you were threatened with severe violence or a weapon but not actually injured, you were abused in Utah and Oklahoma, but not most other states (unless the threats caused a diagnosed mental…

(3/6) Was it bad enough? Does it count even if others had it worse? How does one quantify the impact of living in fear of one’s primary caregivers? The inconsistency in the laws across states adds to this problem. If the beatings only left mild bruising, you were abused in Delaware but not Wyoming.

(2/6) so too the social script of the abused child as bruised and bleeding, showing up at the hospital with yet another broken bone can make it difficult for those who experienced physical violations and violence without visible or lasting injury to understand and communicate their experience.

(7/7) So, yeah. Children in the US have fewer legal protections from violence than literally any other group.

(6/7) child by striking them on the face or head if they are under the age of 4 (for older kids it has to cause "serious injury" to count as abuse). In most states, emotional abuse has to cause either "delinquent" behavior or a diagnosed (often "severe") mental health disorder.

(5/7) harm or injury. Fewer than a handful of states consider the infliction of severe pain without lasting physical injury to be abuse. Only a few consider threats of serious physical violence (or threats with a weapon) to be forms of abuse. In one state it's only a crime to cause injury to a…

(4/7)from the definition of child abuse (the amount of pain you can inflict without leaving more than mild bruising and transient marks is actually quite high, especially if that is your goal). A majority have religious exceptions to laws against medical neglect even when it results in serious…

(3/7) But, a majority of states define abuse as causing "lasting or permanent injury" or result in "substantial impairment of a bodily organ." Multiple states explicitly exclude "mild bruising" and "transient marks and swelling" inflicted by "reasonable and moderate corporal punishment"…

(2/7) removal of children from good parents. For these I'm grateful. There are also lot of states where the language is so broad and vague that without any knowledge of case law and interpretive precedents, it's hard to know what protections they actually provide for children.